


wreck in our hands

by gliss



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Dreaming, God Bless America - Freeform, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, guilt and rage and dark shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-07-05
Packaged: 2018-04-07 18:13:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4273101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gliss/pseuds/gliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Lynch</i>, comes the sneer, made razor-sharp by white light. The word itself stretches out into thin curved lips and curling cigarette smoke, licks slow and bitter into the forest.</p><p>Kavinsky himself, the master forger, now a forged masterpiece, stands between the trees in his white tank, splotches of black smoke and ash smeared like blood between his ribs. His hair is still spiked, but messy; his hungry eyes reflect whatever he wants the most at the moment. All over his skin are smudges of his death, gasoline and fire leaving scorch marks on his bare arms and the side of his neck and an angry lack of giving a shit tattooed in the gleam of his earring.</p><p>Ronan closes his eyes against the sharp whiteness of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wreck in our hands

**Author's Note:**

> happy fourth. rmbr kavinsky.   
>  warnings: drug references, really unhealthy lines of thinking, dream thief spoilers, kavinsky in general, a small and vague instance of nsfw, this probably gets confusing at some point as well. i tried to make it somewhat in canon but lbr kavinsky is no longer in the realm of canon things so. here we are.

 

 

A guilty thing:

 _Lynch_ , comes the sneer, made razor-sharp by white light. The word itself stretches out into thin curved lips and curling cigarette smoke, licks slow and bitter into the forest.

Kavinsky himself, the master forger, now a forged masterpiece, stands between the trees in his white tank, splotches of black smoke and ash smeared like blood between his ribs. His hair is still spiked, but messy; his hungry eyes reflect whatever he wants the most at the moment. All over his skin are smudges of his death, gasoline and fire leaving scorch marks on his bare arms and the side of his neck and an angry lack of giving a shit tattooed in the gleam of his earring.

Ronan closes his eyes against the sharp whiteness of him.

“Kavinsky,” he says; the name, singed against his throat, nearly whistles its way out.

 

-

 

A second guilty thing:

Ronan comes back to the forest.

He’s thinking his imagination should receive some kind of award for being so thoughtful. His dream Kavinsky circles around the forest, a sleepwalker who can’t sleep, can’t dream, but in all other aspects is more or less like the one he knew in real life.

(And in the end, who knew Kavinsky better than Ronan?

In the end, Ronan was the one who walked into his dreams and came out alive on the other side. In the end, Ronan was the one that touched hundreds of white Mitsubishis and felt the depth of an alternate reality, coated and drugged as it were. In the end, Ronan held all the strings in his fingers and had to figure out what to do with them.)

His Kavinsky, a product of Ronan Lynch’s mind, has the same sneer and the same loose rabid grin and the same jagged white sunglasses; he wears a stack of leather bands on his wrist like some kind of answer or some kind of promise. His Kavinsky hooks his thumbs into belt loops like they’re goddamn entitled to do so and Ronan feels furiously, hopelessly sorry for all of it—

That this is a dream,

More or less –

That’s it’s only a dream.

 

-

 

(The first time he sees him he knows he’s not awake.)

 

-

 

Ronan doesn’t distinguish guilt from anger anymore. It’s easier that way.

Kavinsky finds him at the edge of sunset, leaning against the base of a large cedar. It’s dark enough that he looks like a wound in reverse, white tank untouched by shadows or gold, like a rip in the collective consciousness of the forest.

Ronan shrugs off his jacket. “I'm not here to fuck around,” he says shortly.

“Oh, I'm _always_ here to fuck around,” Kavinsky replies with dark delight. His eyebrows dance the sort of suggestive dance that makes Ronan hate him and simultaneously slump back further into the tree.

He takes a breath and tries to tell himself that because Kavinsky is his, _literally_ his, that he wouldn’t act like a fucking asshole at every given opportunity – but then, that’s also Kavinsky. And he reminds himself that just because he created this – him – he is his own sentient being now, with his own thought process, his own existence. The only thing tying them together is responsibility. Ronan feels like a skeleton, cold and bare, when he says, “There’s – I'm not going to be around forever.”

Kavinsky starts to hum something that sounds sad and Slavic. “D’you hear that? That’s a funeral march. So, what, you here to tell me to take care of myself? Didn’t think you _cared_ , Lynch.”

“There’s no point,” Ronan snarls. The melody rises and weeps, stutters like a dying engine from Kavinsky’s smoke-scratched voice, completely unlike the Irish shit Niall taught him when he was young. “If I die, you’re nothing. There won’t be anything to take care of, you fucking dumbass Polish c—”

Kavinsky crouches down into his space like it’s nothing. Ronan’s breath gives a great fluttering defeated sigh in his chest. “Lynch,” Kavinsky says, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were _worried_ about me. Is that what it is? Or did Richard the Third tell you to salvage what was left of your conscience and promise you doggy treats if you paid me a little visit?”

“Gansey doesn’t _care_ ,” Ronan nearly screams, “ _Gansey_ doesn’t care! He doesn’t even know about this, _no one knows_.”

 

-

 

Compounded like that, Ronan’s fourth secret became Joseph Kavinsky.

“So you couldn’t make up your mind either way,” Kavinsky taunts into his mouth, “with me or against me, Lynch? Or, I suppose you took the literal meaning of against me. Do you finally think I'm prettier than Dick?”

“Why,” there’s a pause; Ronan’s fingers are pulling at the zipper on Kavinsky’s jeans, wondering if his pants are really that tight or if his mind had just done him an extraordinary favor, “why are you so fucking obsessed with Gansey? I told you it’s nothing like that, we’re nothing like that, like – _fuck_ – like this?”

They’re stranded in the forest, bars of sunlight falling across their skin. Kavinsky’s eyelashes tickle against the underside of his jaw. He’s eager, wolfishly going at whatever part of Ronan’s skin he can taste. Ronan finds himself shoved up against this tree, then that tree; their fucking is wild and sprawling and destructive, leaves splinters and red scratches and poison ivy where there shouldn’t be poison ivy, not that it matters (– a cure is just a dream away!, Kavinsky singsongs at him –).

It’s unbridled and rough and makes him feel charged up by lightning and gunpowder, and that’s enough, then.

 

-

 

“Isn’t there a place you talked about,” Kavinsky asks him. He looks serious, which means his face looks blank and uncertain, unsure of how to rearrange itself without the charismatic smile. Smirk. Black humor brushed from his teeth, Kavinsky just looks half-dead and half-wistful.

He looks like Noah.

Ronan opens his mouth to tell him all about Cabeswater, about the golden light and green grass and Aurora waiting with a smile and Matthew rolling down a hill and bounding towards him, laughter brighter than anything in the sky, but then he shuts it.

“I won’t take you there,” he says.

Kavinsky stares at him. His face is very pale, and the ash stain on his cheek looks like a bruise. “Oh,” he sighs.

Ronan stares back. Even with this – with Kavinsky robbed of whatever had been fueling him, forced to survive on dream power without the ability to dream, played in every which way by Ronan so hard that he doesn’t know what counts as revenge and what doesn’t anymore – even with what Ronan doesn’t want to think is remorse or pity or _anything_ , he can’t take Kavinsky to Cabeswater.

“I'm working on it,” he says instead.

 

-

 

(“It’s that easy,” Ronan asks, disbelieving. Kavinsky makes a knifeblade smile.

“You said ‘with me’,” he answers, and drags Ronan out of the dream.)

 

-

 

Kavinsky doesn’t ask again, and Ronan doesn’t offer – in the end, he doesn’t deserve it. In the end he was the one who dropped Matthew into a nondescript car trunk like luggage, who wrought a fucking dragon upon Henrietta and called it fun. But Kavinsky does ask him to leave, the first time in this life and the last that he’s done so.

Kavinsky has – had – so many _things_ that Ronan feels panic at the brink of all the emptiness he sees. Would the real Kavinsky have shown this? He doesn’t know.

But his Kavinsky is showing it.

“I'm working on it,” Ronan repeats again, but it comes out like a curtain descending, heavy and shuttered and muffled and stiff.

“Alright.”

“See you tom—”

“Later.”

 

-

 

All of his other dreams felt like discoveries – except this one feels like something being thrust upon him, glistening moon-white and remote even with a large, heavy presence. Ronan sees everything as white, glossy paint white, black knife slashes like nightmares whipping across wherever he is. It looks like the side of a Mitsubishi.

He inhales and smells paint, lets it go right to his head.

“Welcome to the party, Lynch,” comes the drawl, and Ronan turns, turns again. “What’s your substance?”

“Am I high?”

“You _look_ high, dude, man, you finally came out.”

“Are we – where the fuck are we? Are we fucking paint particles?”

Kavinsky, or the approximation of Kavinsky that rises out of the white paint, grins. “Sick, right?”

And Ronan – relief crashing into him stronger than the paint fumes, because he can’t remember how he got here or what he was thinking, just that Kavinsky is solidly standing before him, his snapback frayed from an explosion, and that he’s too unprepared to see death or cause it or –

“Yeah,” he breathes, easy as anything, “yeah. _Sick_.”

 

-

 

Kavinsky is ghastly when Ronan sees him next, paler than ever.

“You look like shit,” Ronan tells him bluntly, pulling him in, his chest aching and aching, but Kavinsky ducks right out of his grasp.

“I didn’t ask you to come back here.”

“Yeah, well, tough fucking luck.”

Kavinsky backs into a shadow, but the moon makes a mirror out of his shirt, and for a second Ronan gets thrown back into the haze of dream thieving from so long ago, pill after pill after fucking pill, milking the ley line dry, sleeping so deep he’s sure he’s seeing hell, the taste of bitterness and magic on his tongue, down his throat.

Ronan takes a step towards him. Kavinsky takes another step back.

“What the hell, man,” Ronan starts.

“I'm not your _pet_ , Lynch,” Kavinsky says.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You treat me like a pet,” comes the too-fast reply, and – yeah, well. It’s true; Ronan knows it’s true and he knows Kavinsky knows now: that this is a revenge story played out too far, and he’s gone in too deep, and he doesn’t have the balls to fix it the way he could fix Adam or help Gansey or keep Noah grounded with the rest of them. Messy shit is what happens when you dream humans into life, or back from the dead. Ronan, for all his alcohol and grunge metal and acid, isn’t messy – he’s too sharp, brittle-clean, everything disguised as itself right there on surface level.

No wonder Kavinsky reads him like a book.

No wonder Kavinsky looks cornered and rabid, no longer the harbinger of everything fleeting and momentous and free. No wonder – Ronan feels the pang in his chest, and he knows it for longing, trying so hard to echo Kavinsky’s shrieking laugh with his own heartbeat and failing so many times, missing cadence after cadence after cadence. He wants Kavinsky tearing the night and he wants Kavinsky’s white-winged anger and he wants Kavinsky to _want_ , to hunger, to be all that he was, a bright and defiant thing.

Kavinsky never wanted to be kept safe or alive or healthy – he never wanted to be _kept_.

It strikes so hard that Ronan practically starts laughing.

“Well,” and – it doesn’t sting as much as he thought it would, “it’s a good thing I'm not keeping you in a cage anymore.”

Kavinsky goes even sharper and more feral. Ronan wants to kiss his eyelashes – he wants to kiss Kavinsky’s goddamn _eyelashes_ , and this sure isn’t a revenge story anymore. He wants Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi screeching into the dark sky and traffic lights like signals, warning red and gunshot green. He wants more adrenaline than his veins can handle and sharp elbows and a smile that means nothing short of danger, and he wants the eager, noisy way Kavinsky presses up into him, sloppy wet kisses with teeth and broken skin and words that stir the pit of stars in his stomach.

He’s thinking this while it gets easier to look at Kavinsky and think – maybe, maybe, everything won’t fall to shit.

“What do you mean?”

Or if it does fall, he’ll have been proud for it.

“Come with me,” Ronan says. Invites. He holds out his hand. “We’re getting out of this forest.”

Kavinsky makes a noise, an incredibly human thing when he himself isn’t. “Where are we going?”

Ronan smiles his viper’s smile. “Home.”

 

// 


End file.
